Resurrecting Pompeii (12 page)

Barnicot and Brothwell
³²
used the data collected by Nicolucci for the males in his sample as comparative material for a statistical study of ancient and modern bones from various regions in an attempt to characterize the ancient Etruscans and to establish their origins. The Penrose statistic was used to determine the distance between populations in terms of size and shape, based on the measurements for maximum cranial length, breadth and height. They found that the Pompeian male sample was close to the Etruscan and modern Roman samples, as well as those of modern Basques and Iron Age Greeks and Britons. When the set of measurements was increased to ten, the Pompeian, along with Roman, Basque, British and Greek Iron Age skulls were found to be further removed from the Etruscan skulls in terms of shape. In contrast, the addition of more characters had the general effect of reducing the distance between the samples in terms of size.

Consideration should be given to the exclusion of female skulls in this population study. Traditionally, skeletal population studies were based on males because, as Barnicot and Brothwell state, ‘there are … systematic differences in size and shape between male and female skulls’.
³³
Barnicott and Brothwell accepted Nicolucci’s sex attributions without question. This is not surprising in the light of the fact that their only interest in Nicolucci’s work was that it provided a data set of an ancient Italian population that could be used to compare with skeletal material of ancient Etruscans. Since Nicolucci did not publish his criteria for sex determination, it is impossible to assess the degree of confidence one could have in his sexing. This means that even if one accepts the assumption that population differences are best represented by one sex, the validity of this work can be questioned on the basis of uncertainty as to the accuracy of sex separation.

D ’Amore, Mallegni and Schiano di Zenise made an examination of the human skeletal remains in Pompeii to mark the 1900th anniversary of the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 1979. Given the status of such studies by the latter part of the twentieth century, it seems remarkable that the main aim of their study was the ‘racial’ classification of the ancient Pompeian population. They based their work on an examination of 123 skulls. They concentrated their efforts on crania for convenience because the skull has traditionally formed the basis of most anthropological studies. The crania which formed their sample were in relatively good condition, though they lacked mandibles. Skulls were selected from the skeletal deposit in the Sarno Baths. They were cleaned and then moved to the Forum Baths. Each skull was arbitrarily assigned a number.

Numerical and qualitative observations were made for each skull in the sample. Non-metric or epigenetic traits were also described in accordance with the definitions of Testut, which date to 1917. The epigenetic results have not yet been published.
³⁴

This study was undertaken as a companion piece to the work of Nicolucci which they described as ‘very accurate and detailed’.
³⁵
One of the aims of D’Amore
et al
. was to check their results against those obtained by Nicolucci. Despite a concerted effort, involving searches in both the
Istituti biologici della Facoltà di Scienze di Napoli
and in the areas of bone storage in Pompeii, they were not able to locate the skulls that Nicolucci examined. They also applied for but were denied access to the skeletal collection in the
Istituto di Antropologia
in Naples where they thought Nicolucci’s sample might be found.

Some of the skulls in the sample they collected from the Sarno Baths had large numbers drawn on the frontal bone. They thought it was possible that these bones had been studied by Nicolucci. However, when they checked the measurements against those recorded by Nicolucci they found that there was no concordance. They concluded that the excavators of the skeletons were responsible for these numbers and that these numbered skulls had never been studied.
³⁶

D ’Amore
et al
.’s first article involved the examination of the sample of 123 skulls to determine their sex and age-at-death (Chapters 6 and 7). They classified 43 skulls as female and 80 as male and calculated that 35 per cent of the sample they studied were female and 65 per cent were male. They concluded that there was probably considerable overlap between the sexes for the features that they chose for sex separation in their sample of Pompeian skulls. They interpreted two skulls as juvenile, 24 males and 25 females as adult, 45 males and 17 females as mature adults and nine males and one female as senile. Pooling the two genders the percentages were: 1.62 per cent juvenile, 39.84 per cent adult, 50.4 per cent mature and 8.3 per cent senile.
³⁷

In their second paper, D ’Amore
et al
. presented the preliminary results of their ‘racial’ typology of the Pompeians.
³⁸
They did not consider that their conclusions were radically different to those reached by Nicolucci nearly a century earlier when he described the ‘Pompeian type’. Their aim was to examine some aspects of the Pompeian crania in greater depth to build on Nicolucci’s original study.

D ’Amore
et al
. described the Pompeian sample they studied in terms of four indices, namely, horizontal or cephalic, vertico-longitudinal, superior facial (or frontal) and nasal. They considered that these provided the basis for an initial ‘racial’ diagnosis. They defined the ‘types’ for males and females from the means they obtained for each index. The males were described as mesocephalic, orthocranial, mesosemial and mesorrhine, while the females were described as brachycepalic, orthocranial, mesosemial and leptorrhine. The modes produced the same results. The main difference between the males and females was that the females had rounder heads and finer noses.

They presented their transformed data in a series of four tables. Unfortunately, they did not exclude the two juvenile crania from their study. Juveniles are not usually used for population studies as measurements and proportions alter during the period of growth.

The first table summarized the results obtained for the four indices they calculated. The number of male and female cases for each division of an index were published, along with their percentages, means and standard deviations. The number of cases for certain measurements did not justify this treatment; for example, the provision of a percentage, mean and standard deviation for two to three females for several classifications is of questionable statistical value. No statistical procedures were undertaken to test significance.

The other three tables showed the relationship between the data for different indices. Relative and absolute frequencies were compared with the data obtained for the cephalic and vertico-longitudinal indices, the cephalic and frontal indices and the vertico-longitudinal and frontal indices. No comparisons were made with the nasal index due to the comparatively small number of measurements that could be made to the facial region as a result of post-mortem bone loss. D’Amore
et al
. concluded from their assessment of the tabulated associations between the three cranial indices that the ‘type’ they described for their Pompeian sample really did exist and was reflected by the coexistence of mesocephaly, orthocrany and mesosemy. It is worth noting that these are the features which, according to the authors, define the males in the sample.

The final section of this paper involved the ‘racial diagnosis’ of the Pompeian skulls in this sample. D’Amore
et al
. classified the skulls as Mediterranean, the ‘race’ that they thought represented Southern Italian populations, albeit with some variation. They suggested that the cephalic index, within certain limits, provided a general guide for ‘racial’ identification. More certain identification was supposedly provided by the other cranial features, whilst local variation was thought to be reflected in the features of the face. The population was considered to be essentially mesocephalic. The relatively high incidence of brachycephaly was attributed to an earlier indigenous type in the region rather than the result of contact with short or roundheaded populations from Eastern countries, like Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Palestine.
³⁹

This paper can be criticized on a number of levels. The most important of these is that the basic premises upon which this study was based had been called into question in the preceding decades and ‘racial’ studies, especially those concerning the so-called European ‘racial groups’ had been discredited. Further, D’Amore
et al
., like Nicolucci, interpreted the data so that they would yield the results they expected, namely that the Pompeian sample reflected a mesocephalic population consistent with a Mediterranean ‘racial’ attribution. While it was perfectly reasonable for a scholar like Nicolucci to make such a study in a nineteenth-century context, it is remarkable that one hundred years later a similar analysis could be conducted so uncritically, and without any reference to the considerable body of recent literature on this topic.

While it took a century for human skeletons to be recognized as an anthropological resource, it required considerably more than an additional century for them to also be seen as a class of archaeological evidence. This meant that, where possible, skeletons would be examined in their excavation context and they would be interrogated in such a way that they would yield answers to questions that actually were of interest to archaeologists. Prior to that, research primarily involved classification. Most archaeologists did not consider this work to be of great relevance to their research and the anthropological studies of Nicolucci and D’Amore and her team were largely ignored in the archaeological literature.

By the time I commenced my work on the human skeletal remains in Pompeii in 1986, all attention had turned to the large collection of victims, which had been discovered four years previously on the beachfront in Herculaneum. These complete skeletons could be carefully excavated and studied in relation to their archaeological context, essentially eclipsing the badly stored piles of bones stored in Pompeian bathhouses (Chapter 5). There was certainly no competition to gain access to the Pompeian material and my work was, at best, considered virtuous, though in general I was just seen as a quaint character working on fairly inferior archaeological material. Sara Bisel told me that she wouldn’t touch the collection of Pompeian skeletons with a bargepole.

Ten years later the situation changed, and despite the compromised nature of the sample, the scientific potential of Pompeian skeletons was recognized and they were again considered worthy of examination. Since my investigation, a number of other scholars have studied these bones. Projects have included revisiting the sample of stored bones in the Forum and Sarno Bath complexes, work on new skeletal finds and previously unstudied skeletons, such as those from the House of Julius Polybius (IX, xiii, 1–3). In addition, there have been attempts to undertake histological examination of the bones and to apply techniques like DNA analysis.
⁴⁰

Only 32 human skeletons were discovered in Herculaneum prior to the 1980s. The lack of bodies was interpreted as evidence that the majority of the inhabitants managed to escape the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, either by sea or by travelling north to Naples. It was assumed that they had this opportunity as they were not exposed to the pumice and ash that covered Pompeii. This material was considered to have been responsible for the large number of victims that were found at the latter site. It was suggested that the people of Herculaneum fled so quickly that they were forced to abandon those that were vulnerable as evidenced by the fact that the few victims found in the urban section of Herculaneum included individuals who could not fend for themselves, such as a baby that was discovered in a wooden cradle in the House of the Gem (Insula orientalis II, n.10). The skeletons of these victims were generally left
in situ
.

In 1982, a number of skeletons were uncovered on the ancient beachfront and in nearby boat chambers. By 2002, an estimated total of 350 individuals had been discovered in this area. The management of human skeletal finds was completely revised with these new finds (Chapter 11). Giuseppe Maggi, the Director of Herculaneum initiated a collaborative project with the National Geographic Society, which included the provision of an American physical anthropologist, Sara Bisel, who was responsible for excavation, restoration, conservation and scientific investigation of the human skeletal remains. She was ultimately responsible for the curation and publication of 139 of the victims.
⁴¹

Bisel ’s pioneering work on the human skeletons in Herculaneum was the first attempt to really integrate physical anthropological and archaeological research. There is no doubt that skeletal studies at Herculaneum benefited from the majority of human remains having been found at a time when the value of bones as an archaeological resource was appreciated. This meant that there was the potential for the application of a more rigorous approach to an examination of the remains of these victims.

Sara Bisel was well positioned to study this material for
National Geographic,
as she was comfortable using an approach that was appropriate for the popular magazine (Chapter 1). She was under considerable pressure to individualize the skeletons she studied, giving them names and investing them with personalities that they never had. This, unfortunately, was not limited to the articles that appeared in
National Geographic
. Her approach, which sometimes included extending the evidence to the realm of speculation, intruded into her scientific publications (Chapters 1 and 8). Nonetheless, the work of Bisel represents a significant shift in attitude from that of her predecessors in Campania, who were primarily interested in physical anthropology, especially craniometry, to an interest in the broader archaeological issues. Her work, in part, reflects the interests of her mentor J. Lawrence Angel who, after having worked on ‘racial’ typology of the ancient Greeks in his early career, became one of the pioneers of palaeodemography after World War II.
⁴²

As it was customary for the dead to be cremated in the first century
_AD
in Italy, Bisel considered that these skeletons were of particular value, since they provided the first sizeable sample of an articulated Roman population from that period. In contrast, she argued that the Pompeian skeletal sample was of little academic value because the bones of individuals had become disarticulated over time from the poor storage techniques in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
⁴³
She used traditional anthropological techniques to establish sex, age-at-death, stature, stress indicators, population affinity and evidence of pathology and also undertook trace element analysis. Her aim was to examine the Herculaneum bones to determine the health and nutritional status of the population, as well as to gain insight into the occupations and social status of individuals.
⁴⁴
The results of Bisel’s study and those of subsequent researchers at Herculaneum are presented in Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9.

By 1985, the remains of 229 individuals had been recovered from the area around the ancient beachfront. Luigi Capasso and his team commenced a study of 162 of the Herculaneum victims in 1993, which was published in an enormous volume in 2001.
⁴⁵
An additional 54 victims were examined by Torino and Fornaciari.
⁴⁶
Capasso’s sample included the 139 skeletons studied by Bisel. He estimated that he examined about 30,000 bones over a period of seven years.
Like all scholars who have worked on the victims of the
_AD
79 eruption,

Capasso appreciated that they represented a large sample of people who died quickly of the same cause in a very short period of time. He saw this sample as a source, not unlike a census, which could be used as the basis for palaeoepidemiological studies as well as palaeodemography. Unlike Bisel, he considered the latter to correspond with the morbidity from pathology in the living population (Chapter 7). His work included the use of traditional anthropological macroscopic observations and measurements to characterize the sample as well as trace element analysis. He also undertook microscopic and radiological examination of the skeletons. One of his main aims was to reconstruct every single aspect of the lives and deaths of each individual in the sample available to him, including their illnesses, their daily activities and work. He considered that wealth of artefacts and literary evidence provided a wonderful opportunity for a multidisciplinary study. While his aims were worthy, he used circumstantial evidence in the form of associated artefacts to aid in the interpretation of the skeletons he studied and, in some cases, extended the evidence to produce interpretations about the lives and occupations of the victims that could be criticized in much the same way as those of Bisel or Bulwer-Lytton (Chapters 1 and 8).
⁴⁷
Capasso continues to publish the results of his research, with particular emphasis on pathological issues.
⁴⁸

Petrone and his colleagues published a preliminary study of 215 victims, including those that were examined by Bisel and Capasso. As with the previous work on this material, these studies involved the use of traditional techniques to establish, sex, age-at-death and dental health. Trace element analysis was also employed to obtain an indication of palaeonutrition.
⁴⁹
It should be noted that work on the Herculaneum skeletons has been interrupted, sometimes for years as a result of political and funding issues. As a result, there were several years where numerous skeletons languished in the boat chambers at the beachfront. These bones were removed early in 2008 when research recommenced, again under the stewardship of Petrone. In addition to a traditional physical anthropological study, Petrone has now broadened his research design to include an interdisciplinary study with vulcanologists to determine the impact of volcanic events on human occupation in this region over time.
⁵⁰

In conclusion, it is possible to identify a series of alterations in attitude to the human skeletal remains from Vesuvian sites. The value of these skeletons as an anthropological resource that should be curated and studied was initially recognized about one hundred years after excavation commenced in Pompeii. The publications that were produced over the next century had minimal impact on the interpretation of Pompeii as physical anthropologists did not address issues that were considered relevant to archaeology. The Vesuvian skeletons were first acknowledged as a class of archaeological evidence that should be studied in their context as part of an integrated multidisciplinary project when the large number of skeletons were revealed at Herculaneum in the latter part of the twentieth century. Since then, there has been increasing interest and a number of projects have been undertaken on all the available victims that have been recovered from the
_AD
79 eruption.